Parent Support and Coaching
- Parent support/coaching can help remove the pressure of having to parent “perfectly” or parent from a “one size fits all” parenting style. One of the most common reasons parents avoid counselling is the idea that they have failed as a parent. We believe the opposite. Our role is to help the parent be the best parent they can be and normalize challenges parents face when their child or youth are struggling.
- Parents are the most important people in a child’s life. Child-counselling is sometimes necessary and helpful; however, we believe you as the parent has a much larger capacity to support their child or youth with their struggles.
- Parent support/coaching can provide you guidance and support to better understand your child’s needs and how to respond meaningfully to your child’s needs. We believe in providing parents with knowledge, tools and emotional support to help you with the struggles your child or youth is experiencing at home and school.
- There are many stressors that children and families may experience, such as separation and divorce, grief and loss, health or mental health-related struggles to name a few. Parent support/coaching can help parents talk to their child or youth about the stressors a family may experience and how to help them through this difficult time. Parents have so much to offer, but often family stress can deplete parents leading them to feel overwhelmed and ineffective. We believe in empowering parents to learn ways to support their children through difficult times.
Child and Youth Counselling
- Counselling may be helpful to children and youth who experience challenging life situations that may cause emotional distress.
- Often children who are experiencing emotional distress can be labelled with various diagnoses. Although diagnosis can be helpful at times, it is important for us to understand what a child’s behaviour and emotion tell us and how to assess and address their needs.
- We work with children to better understand their experiences and the impact of those experiences on their current functioning (behavioural, social, emotional and academic). It is important to us to gain an understanding of a child’s experiences and their perspectives. This helps us to set goals and develop strategies with the child and youth.
Family Therapy
- Family Therapy
- We believe that the parent-child relationship is most important. Life can present challenges that can impact families and the parent-child relationship.
- When children move through different ages and stages or families go through transitions or challenges, parents can find it difficult to connect and understand their children. We believe that each family is unique, but all families can make changes and strengthen the parent-child relationship.
- Each developmental stage can present its own unique challenges. We work with parents and infants, parents and children and parents and youth.
Child Medical Support
- Children and youth may have had negative experiences in the past from visits to various medical care clinics, family doctors, dentists, etc. These experiences may have contributed to their fear of needles, vaccines, blood work, IV, or other medical procedures associated with their health care.
- Today with children and youth needing vaccines, the fear of the unknown may cause more stress than is necessary. Additionally, one child’s medical experience can affect the entire family.
- As pediatric health care professionals, we help children cope with hospitalizations and medical procedures. We do this by developing age-appropriate strategies to minimize trauma and increase their understanding of medical diagnosis using consultation, therapeutic play, education, preparation, and activities that promote education and understanding.
Parent-child work with infants and young children
- Caring for a young baby or toddler can be a very special time. However, we know that this can also be a challenging and exhausting time for parents.
- Sometimes, parents’ experiences or stressors can impact how difficult it can be to connect, understand or respond to infants and toddlers.
- Difficult or stressful life events can also impact infants and toddlers, which is often overlooked as parents are sometimes told that young children are less impacted or “won’t remember.”
- We believe when working with infants and young children, the focus of the work is not on the parent or the little person but rather the relationship between the parent and the child.
- It is important to us to support parents in reading, understanding and responding to their infant and toddlers cues (smiles, cries, cooing, body language, behaviour and emotions) to help infants and toddlers thrive. It is also important to us to support parents in understanding changes in a young person’s cues and how to respond following stressful life events.
